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Interesting they're allowed to use stackexchange. I don't know much about the legalities of scraping. Was this an agreement between them, or is it simply ok to

by afro88 4y ago

Interesting they're allowed to use stackexchange. I don't know much about the legalities of scraping. Was this an agreement between them, or is it simply ok to scrape and use the data in a model?

progbits 4y ago
https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing Doesn't this imply the produced model has to be CC-BY-SA too?
- wongarsu 4y ago
  By that line of reasoning, GitHub copilot would have to be GPL. Until somebody fights about this in court we don't really know. But even in the worst case the CC-BY-SA is one of the easier licenses to fulfill, not much worse than the MIT-licensed code contained in the dataset.
- gattilorenz 4y ago
  Welcome to this can of worms. CC-BY-SA content needs attribution too, but I don’t see the(se) model(s) in the current state being able to do so. I imagine we’re gonna see the IBM PC bios/Unix/ReactOS “tainted code” arguments again in court, this time is not the human who is more-or-less knowingly responsible for sneaking in copyrighted code.
- gpm 4y ago
  No. It means that if they are doing something that is prohibited by copyright law (without a license) then it needs to be CC-BY-SA. The only theory under which training this sort of model is remotely legal is that doing so is not prohibited by copyright law in the first place. If that theory is correct they don't need a license, and they don't need to abide by any terms of licenses that they were granted without asking. If that theory is incorrect, they have to comply with the stackoverflow license, but they also have to not use any of the (massive amounts) of unlicensed training data they are using, and comply with the numerous incompatible licenses other sources of training data are licensed under. In other words it's impossible to do this.
  - jameshart 4y ago
    If ‘reading something and using the content to update your Bayesian priors about the world’ is a breach of copyright, then reading things is a breach of copyright. The tricky new world that the LLM opens up is that it lets you distribute an exact copy of the result of having read the thing. That’s something you can’t do with a human mind (although it’s sort of the job description of a ‘teacher’).
    - gpm 4y ago
      Humans and machines are distinct with respect to copyright law. A human memorizing a book is legal. A machine scanning a book is creating a new copy and is in (at least some cases) illegal. It is not obvious that just because humans are allowed to learn from things that machines also are. I tend to favour the view that in this case it is legal (by way of the de minimis doctrine), but I don't think it's a trivial question.
      - jameshart 4y ago
        A human memorizing a book is legal; a human reciting that book aloud for an audience is not (performances of plays require licenses to the performing rights of a work, for example). Distribution is when the issue arises - not consumption and construction of a mental model. I acknowledge the parallels are imperfect and this all needs to be worked out in court. But it’s possible that at the pace LLMs are developing, by the time courts start addressing these questions we’ll already be questioning whether the distinction between machines and people is as big as we thought.
        gpm 4y ago
        Copyright law prohibits copying (some exceptions apply) amongst other things not just distribution.
        pyth0 4y ago
        brb, acquiring the necessary license to read my son a bedtime story.
- taneq 4y ago
  Even if the model doesn’t, where does code written with the aid of an llm end up after the various rulings about the output of Stable Diffusion etc. not being copyrightable at all?
jameshart 4y ago
The entire purpose of stackexchange was to create a scrapeable index of questions and answers. The scraper they expected was googlebot, not an LLM trainer, and what they expected it to do was build an index of what questions and answers are located on each of their pages.
andrewaylett 4y ago
No need to scrape, you can grab a dump from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
patrakov 4y ago
Good that they disclosed it. In one of the places where I worked before, I had to sign a statement that I won't copy code from stackexchange, because of the unclear licensing. That is, the risk that the answer is quoted from or otherwise based on some open-source project, and because that could, in the worst case, force the company to disclose their code publicly.

by afro88 4y ago

Interesting they're allowed to use stackexchange. I don't know much about the legalities of scraping. Was this an agreement between them, or is it simply ok to scrape and use the data in a model?

progbits 4y ago

https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing Doesn't this imply the produced model has to be CC-BY-SA too?

wongarsu 4y ago
By that line of reasoning, GitHub copilot would have to be GPL. Until somebody fights about this in court we don't really know. But even in the worst case the CC-BY-SA is one of the easier licenses to fulfill, not much worse than the MIT-licensed code contained in the dataset.
gattilorenz 4y ago
Welcome to this can of worms. CC-BY-SA content needs attribution too, but I don’t see the(se) model(s) in the current state being able to do so. I imagine we’re gonna see the IBM PC bios/Unix/ReactOS “tainted code” arguments again in court, this time is not the human who is more-or-less knowingly responsible for sneaking in copyrighted code.
gpm 4y ago
No. It means that if they are doing something that is prohibited by copyright law (without a license) then it needs to be CC-BY-SA. The only theory under which training this sort of model is remotely legal is that doing so is not prohibited by copyright law in the first place. If that theory is correct they don't need a license, and they don't need to abide by any terms of licenses that they were granted without asking. If that theory is incorrect, they have to comply with the stackoverflow license, but they also have to not use any of the (massive amounts) of unlicensed training data they are using, and comply with the numerous incompatible licenses other sources of training data are licensed under. In other words it's impossible to do this.
- jameshart 4y ago
  If ‘reading something and using the content to update your Bayesian priors about the world’ is a breach of copyright, then reading things is a breach of copyright. The tricky new world that the LLM opens up is that it lets you distribute an exact copy of the result of having read the thing. That’s something you can’t do with a human mind (although it’s sort of the job description of a ‘teacher’).
  - gpm 4y ago
    Humans and machines are distinct with respect to copyright law. A human memorizing a book is legal. A machine scanning a book is creating a new copy and is in (at least some cases) illegal. It is not obvious that just because humans are allowed to learn from things that machines also are. I tend to favour the view that in this case it is legal (by way of the de minimis doctrine), but I don't think it's a trivial question.
    - jameshart 4y ago
      A human memorizing a book is legal; a human reciting that book aloud for an audience is not (performances of plays require licenses to the performing rights of a work, for example). Distribution is when the issue arises - not consumption and construction of a mental model. I acknowledge the parallels are imperfect and this all needs to be worked out in court. But it’s possible that at the pace LLMs are developing, by the time courts start addressing these questions we’ll already be questioning whether the distinction between machines and people is as big as we thought.
      - gpm 4y ago
        Copyright law prohibits copying (some exceptions apply) amongst other things not just distribution.
      - pyth0 4y ago
        brb, acquiring the necessary license to read my son a bedtime story.
taneq 4y ago
Even if the model doesn’t, where does code written with the aid of an llm end up after the various rulings about the output of Stable Diffusion etc. not being copyrightable at all?

jameshart 4y ago

The entire purpose of stackexchange was to create a scrapeable index of questions and answers. The scraper they expected was googlebot, not an LLM trainer, and what they expected it to do was build an index of what questions and answers are located on each of their pages.

andrewaylett 4y ago

No need to scrape, you can grab a dump from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

patrakov 4y ago

Good that they disclosed it. In one of the places where I worked before, I had to sign a statement that I won't copy code from stackexchange, because of the unclear licensing. That is, the risk that the answer is quoted from or otherwise based on some open-source project, and because that could, in the worst case, force the company to disclose their code publicly.